Recently, it has been considered to use household electrical appliances that are connected to a network such as the Internet. For instance, a microwave, etc. connected to the Internet and operable by downloading a recipe has appeared on the market. Such a trend is becoming more remarkable with the advent of the network era, and various kinds of household electrical appliances are being connected to a network via a telephone line, etc.
The standardization, etc. of a method for connecting various household electrical appliances has been considered by various standardization groups and the standardization of physical connection protocol for various household electrical appliances is carried out. However, the content of services actually provided and the format of data to be sent and received between household electrical appliances have not been decided and are dependent upon each equipment.
Furthermore, in the field of so-called white goods such as conventional home use cooking devices, a connection service via a network has not been considered because such goods basically operate and function as a product by itself.
Furthermore, conventionally, in order to realize a service through network connection, a device called a server for carrying out an integrated management was required. FIG. 45 shows an example of a conventional configuration. As shown in FIG. 45, a conventional network configuration necessarily includes a Lookup service server 703 for registering and managing the content of a service of each apparatus connected to a network 702. The Lookup service server 703 carries out collective management of various services and processing of registering and request etc. of new services.
When a service provider 700 for providing services is connected to a network 702, first, it broadcasts the content of services to be provided via the network 702. Thereby, the Lookup service server 703 registers the presence of the service provider 700 and the service content thereof.
When the service is requested by a client 701, the Lookup service server 703 introduces the service provider 700 for providing the requested service based on the registered service content. Thereby, the service receiver (the client 701) and the service provider (the service provider 700) are known to each other. As a result, the client 701 can receive the provided services by using the introduced service provider 700.
Furthermore, an enormous amount of information is present on the Internet and the absolute amount of information valuable for a user is increasing. Therefore, if the user uses the information on the Internet well, it is possible to obtain various kinds of interesting information efficiently. However, at the same time, since the amount of unnecessary information also is increasing, an information distribution system connecting the information sender (the service provider side) and the information receiver (the service user side) in good balance has been needed.
However, a network connection apparatus such as a conventional household electrical appliance or an audio equipment, etc. required a household integrated management system called a server, and operation, coordination, sensing, data collection, etc. were carried out collectively by this server.
Thus, conventional network connection apparatuses have a plurality of problems as follows because the server is required.
Firstly, since the apparatus called a server generally is constituted by a computer, etc., it is necessary to set a computer itself in advance. Furthermore, a new computer has to be set every time a new apparatus is added. Secondly, when the server is out of order, even if each apparatus is not out of order, the whole apparatus cannot operate, and thus the entire network apparatus cannot operate. Thirdly, power is not always supplied to household electrical appliances. When the power of the server is down, the network apparatus as a whole cannot operate.
Therefore, it is an object of the present invention to provide a network connection apparatuses capable of providing new services or functions only by being connected to a network without using an integrated management system called a server.